Hey everyone! I’ve been using Antergos with the Cinnamon desktop environment on my PC for I think 6 or 7 months and haven’t had any many major issues until now. I’ve been using Linux for a while now but I’m still kind of a noob. I’m new to the community and forums so if I posted this in the wrong place or something sorry!

So I went to turn on my PC this morning and it booted to black screen, and the only thing I can do is move my mouse cursor around. I remember yesterday I did an update and I think some Cinnamon stuff got updated so I’m assuming it broke Cinnamon. I tried to boot into the “fallback” mode and it booted up my wallpaper and said it had to restart Cinnamon, but I still couldn’t do anything but move my mouse cursor.

If anybody has an idea on how to fix this without doing anything crazy like reinstalling the OS that would be great! Thank you!

@manuel I did Ctrl+Alt+F2 and I can get into the terminal, but installing a different kernel didn’t fix it. I would prefer to not have to switch de’s, so I’m wondering if there’s maybe a command to delete and reinstall Cinnamon?

It seems to me there is a spate of broken updates recently.
In a terminal can you runsudo pacman -Qk | fgrep -v "0 missing files"
If all is well, there is no output for this command set.
Otherwise it will list packages with missing files, which can lead to weird behaviour (in my experience).
Finallysudo pacman -Dk
output should beNo database errors have been found!

Ok so so far I’ve tried installing the LTS kernel, looked for kernel errors (didn’t find any), reinstalled Cinnamon, reinstalled the open source AMD GPU drivers (with the help of a Discord server) and Cinnamon still doesnt work. It keeps going into a “fallback” mode and crashes every time I restart it. Not sure what’s going on…

Ok so I managed to remove Cinnamon and install Mate! When I log in, I get a window saying “An error was detected in the current theme that could interfere with the system login process.”. If I click “Load default theme” I get the black screen and cursor again, "and “Load fallback theme” brings me to a white screen with a shutdown button on the top right. Maybe I’m missing a package or something?

Didn’t realize this would be a huge adventure lol! I’m going to take a break and continue tomorrow…